Live Blogging from iDMAa Day 2: The Industry Talks Back

What do you get when you get a panel of experts in Digital Media and Arts in a room?

Let's find out!

Panelists

Dale Herigstad, Schematic
Kurt Kratchman, Schematic
Ed Jones, President of Constellation Communication

Topics

Lot's of conversation about how to get students ready for this. How do we as educators teach this and keep students fearless, innovative and life long learners? How do you teach THAT in a classroom?

Interesting information from Kurt Kratchman

Based on eBay: What if?? Video and Commerce converge in the eBay space?

1. Commerce Vision: Integrate music video with products so all of it can be purchased on eBay. Watch the video and images of products come up.
2. Community Vision: Provide places for you to connect with others through eBay and find where they are and what they like. The same with recommendations. Someone can have their own vide show that recommends items for auction .... YouTube meets eBay!

Items that had a story behind it SOLD MORE! It's all about being able to tell the STORY ( a theme I've heard from Art Bell!!)

Employees need to have a well-rounded contextual understanding of techcian and the designer.

What about the business side?

Ed talks about the marketing and business end (my kind of guy!)

In order to sell the digital media -- you have to know who is willing to pay for it! And you need to think about it right up front (duh!)

Reasons for failure: poor communication, failure to engage the right audience, failure to obtain a behavior response that links to the business equation.

Q&A

What are the characteristcs of a college grad?

1. Look for design talent that can communicate -- well rounded individual who not only knows the tools, but can understand the implications, and they can communicate and persuade.
2. Humility and no one is afraid to work to solve the problem (be fearless!)
3. Contextual framework -- and understanding of how they fit into the process/structure of the organization
4. If you can sell your ideas and defend your process and product -- it's key. Put into your program -- Presentation Skills! Problem Solving! Project Management!

Now how do you create the new employee for this?

Students who know design fundamentals, audio fundamentals, art fundamentals, video fundamentals, marketing (YES!), strategy -- all in one. No more silos. It's a HYBRID approach in education that is needed. It's about Critical Thinking too. Sounds like a call for the work we are doing in the CORE at Champlain! And then perhaps a bit of the work we are doing in several of our programs.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is effecting programming and technology -- but innovation cannot be outsourced. Repeatable process can be replicated everywhere.

Students focus on the Computer can do it all -- how do you get them to understand it's more than that!

When you show them exceptional work, the student wants to do that immediately, but the teacher needs to set the context to a local understanding and help the students do what they can do. You need to give your students an opportunity to fail. You have to create environments where they can step beyond the next level. You can't tell them. Humility is important. Start from where you are. Having professionals talk to students seems to make a big difference. When you have control of your curriculum you can structure it in a way that responds to the industry needs.

Live Blogging from iDMAa Day 2: Invasive Blended Media

We started early this morning (8:30 a.m.) with a presentation from Schematic, an interactive design agency located in the big cities (NYC, Boston LA, etc.). The speaker is their Chief Design Officer, Dale Herigstad and his topic is "New Television".

What is New Television? Rich media content comes from more than the TV. It is combined with internet, and all the wonderful stuff we are talking about during this conference.

Screen with media (info, applications, music, video) vs. just the TV. TV is a sequential flow/presentation that includes programming, promotion, branding, wayfinding, and advertising.

Now, screens are connected through IP (wired and wireless). No longer just one mode. It's now an "ecosystem" For example, NBC etc. now is porting out to many different devices, not just TV anymore.

Some interesting points

• Rich media is layered in space and dynamic in time.
• Use animation and motion to improve user experience.

Space in Media

• Front (me the viewer0) what is happening in front of the screen
• Behind what is happening ON the screen

Traditional TV experience is the 10 foot experience (how far away we are from the screen)
So options are: 10 ft: broadcast, 2 ft: computer, and 1 ft: mobile.

But there are others....which include Personal media combines the 2 and 1, friends and family is the 10-3 foot and then public media is 200, 25 (such as touch screens in airports). It's about a different type of experience. How do you then plan for all of this different "experience" when developing media? Then how do they converge? For example, interfacing with the large screen in Times Square with a mobile phone.

When developing for all of this, the only one that is mouse interaction is the computer, but most of the screen media is non-mouse driven.

Example: ACCENTURE (Kennedy Airport or O'Hare Airport) -- the behind the screen is cameras that track hand movements. One problem they came up with is that people didn't know they could interact with the wall, so the team had to build in images of people touching the different points to show how it would work.

He calls it a "virtual branded space" -- moving away from the page model.

There are many different ways that space is evolving that he talked about. iTunes with horizontal navigation that flows, windows media player where the navigation works left, right or up and down. They are changing how information is approached and how to navigate around a space. Looks like that left hand navigation in the static website is "dead"! He called it a non-page space site -- clicking does not take you to another page -- clicking just allows new content to flow within the same space. WHOA!!

He showed a prototype for Microsoft XBox connection to the TV/Cable company. Um the navigation is AMAZING -- rendering of the graphics is on the fly. From a user? OMG! He said it seems wild...and it looks overwhelming. I'd love to play with it, but I can feel uneasy about it....it seems like too much even though he said it was easy to navigate. Hmmm...I'll need to reflect on this one a bit more. Wish I could toss out a screen shot!

Other space
Game space for EA Sports. They create beyond the game space to provide live feeds from the ESPN ticker and connects the game world to the "real" world in one space. He called it "invasive media" or "blended media".

The prototype stuff he showed around TV and new navigation that is connected to many other "spaces" is like the iTunes/iPod navigation gone crazy.

HD-DVD allows for the programmed movie, but then you can layer in and port website info on the fly, and advertising info, and anything else you can think of...to allow the user to watch the movie, stop it, access relevant content all through the DVD movie experience. Are we there yet? There are technological issues that they are working out to bring in the information from the website to the DVD -- so in other words, the silo concept in developing a movie and ad campaign etc. is surely going away. The development of any of this will have to be so layered with individuals who can see ALL the possibilities. The traditional marketing of a movie, for example, will now have to take into account how to ensure that all of the channels and media messages can be integrated and flow to a screen...one screen...on demand by the user. It has to be compatibile.

Wow! This is all about this notion of "invasive blended media".

Want to get a feel for this? Go to their website. On the home page, move your mouse to the top of the image of the home page and notice the - sign that comes up. See what happens. You can see all of the pages -- visually. True visual navigation.

Impact on SEO? I wonder. Impact on marketing? HUGE.

Another example: ShopVougeTV and Microsoft Surface